International adoption literature has revealed much about the impact of an adoption process on birth mothers and birth parents. However, published research insufficiently reflects separately on the experiences of birth fathers, a significantly marginalised and silent population. Grief similar to that of birth mothers associated with the adoption of a child experienced by birth fathers is complicated by feelings of disenfranchisement, shame, guilt, and stigma. This is also compounded by the continued psychological presence of the child in their lives. This paper reports on Australian birth fathers’ experiences of the adoption of their biological child. Interviews were conducted with twenty-six participants. An interpretivist model informed by a hermeneutic phenomenological approach enhanced the analysis of data from in-depth qualitative interviews and qualitative responses. Key findings highlighted the long- term permanent impact of the adoption events on birth fathers. Birth fathers’ exclusion, invisibility and disenfranchisement worsened their often-negative experiences. The lack of acknowledgement of their fatherhood on the birth certificate was a significant issue of dissatisfaction. Later-life contact and reunion were identified as issues with the potential to alleviate complicated grief and feelings of ambiguous loss. This research contributes helpful insights to assist governments, policy makers and practitioners in future adoption practices

The Code of Ethics of the Association of Professional Genealogists promotes the communication of coherent, clear, and well-organised information). It is not that simple when adoption features in a family’s history. This paper suggests that standard approaches to family tree-construction will struggle to capture the complexities, gaps, and challenges posed by adoption. Firstly, the paper makes the case for family historians having an alertness to adoption by noting the number of people affected by adoption. It then goes on to look at the literature that argues that adoption involves erasures of birth families and makes ghosts of them. Adoption also creates possible selves and lives; the adopted person’s “could-have-beens” had there been no adoption, the biological child that the adoptive parents might have had and could not, the birth mother’s life with the child lost to adoption. These presences and possibilities haunt all involved in adoption, and writers have posited the existence of a “ghost kingdom”. This paper maps out a greater ghost world of adoption, paradoxically full of life, and because of access to birth records, a world that offers a much greater potential for materialisation. The paper avoids the traditional notions of ghosts as things to be shunned or as representatives of pathologies. Instead, it asks for respect for the “not-dead”/“not-past” of adoption and for family history researchers, a capacity to embrace the jumbled, the murky, and the disorganised. People everywhere are increasingly constructing their own family trees, with all the potential for pleasant surprise but also the shock that this might bring. Should genealogists overlook adoption’s ghosts then they overlook the opportunity to professionally map a rich and varied world of family knowledge and connections. The paper concludes with this observation coupled with a discussion of other associated ethical implications of family history work where adoption features.

This paper reports on survey work and group discussion by a Scottish parent-led support group (Parents Advocacy and Rights – PAR) that supports parents with children in the care system. A previous paper has been published discussing an overview of the survey results ( www.pfan.uk/uncovering-the-pain/ ). The present paper delves further into parents’ particular experiences of contact. The responses are preceded by a critical retrospective of the concept of contact. Our retrospective covers the language of contact, contact’s origins, continuing confusions of meaning and the lack of appreciation of the parental experience and points to the artificiality of contact, the impracticalities of contact arrangements and the toll taken by these. We conclude by pointing out that we are in the fourth decade of recommendations about contact between parents and children in state care. We make the observations that there is a continuing failure to empathise with parents’ experience of deprivation and loss, a lack of comprehension of the depth of detriment to parental identity caused by the process and practices of contact and avoidance of discussion of the damage to the parent–child relationship which, irrespective of the ultimate destination of a child in state care, cannot be obliterated.

Since 1998, the Scottish Government has periodically issued guidance for child protection practice. This has grown from seventy-seven pages to two hundred and seventy pages in the latest draft iteration – The Draft National Guidance for Child Protection in Scotland (2020). This review of the Draft Guidance takes a rare, because critical and problematising, look at a policy document intended to influence social work practice with children and families. The review points to omissions, questions inclusions and looks at the ways that the Draft Guidance seeks to claim our attention for some matters and not others. With a focus upon appearances and the author's impressions, close reading of text and language usage, the review offers strategies for critical reading of policy documents.

This paper begins with a precis and discussion of what we know of reunions between adopted adults and their families of birth. There then follows insights from a study of the long-term outcomes of reunions and what the emergent relationships suggest about the nature of kinship. It goes on to the subject of donor conception, specifically what we might be able to ‘read across’ from the challenges that adoption can pose relating to identity and what we mean when we talk about family and kinship. The paper concludes: ‘An end to secrecy, openness, acknowledgement of feelings of loss, and respect for biological connections have been essential for the well-being and stability of adopted people and their families. So too are these actions vital for donor-conceived people’.

This paper reviews what we know about the experiences of adopted people who discover in later-life that they are adopted. It begins by discussing how and why various facets of the adoption experience have come to the fore over the 20th and 21st century time span of contemporary adoption. The paper concludes with the fact that research on the late discovery of adoption is in its infancy. It also points to parallels that will exist for people who have been conceived by anonymous donation and raises additional areas for possible research.

With the benefit of an anthropological attention to the importance of ‘things’ and the relations between ourselves and things (‘artefacts’), this paper gives attention to the Social Work File. Despite the rise of electronic recording, social work archives remain full of thousands of files that are increasingly accessed, especially by those who have been in care, and physical file-keeping remains a regular feature of practice. There is already a body of literature relating to the information in social work files, however this paper shifts the focus from this to the nature and role of the File itself. ‘Hidden in plain sight’ but laden with meaning and capacity, I identify the little we know already about the file. The various ways files and their authors and subjects, can interact are explored together with the file’s symbolic properties and the power held by the file’s owner, and the ability of the file to ‘other’ its subject. Whilst we understand that the practice shapes the file, how might the file shape practice?

Sharing Care makes a contribution to the—by now—well-acknowledged burgeoning body of literature on fathers, fathering and fatherhood. Unlike some of the contributions to this body, Sharing Care is not so much father focussed as equal parenting focussed and a parental rather than predominantly paternal, emphasis runs through the work. What is also fresh about Sharing Care? First, the particular focus of Sharing Care is fathers’ early years care-giving and second, Rachel Brooks and Paul Hodkinson repeatedly return to the question of ‘are fathers temporary stand-ins’ during this period? No matter how much they do, the default assumption being that fathers in the early years of their child's life, are just ‘helping out’. And to its credit, Sharing Care is a book that looks to upset this assumption. Brooks and Hodkinson focus on men who have matched or exceeded the responsibilities of their partners and gone beyond equal sharing of early years childcare and domestic work to demonstrate unusual levels of fatherly care-giving (p. 5). They do so from a narrow evidence base of interviews with 24 fathers, and, although the limitations of such a small number of fathers are acknowledged, this must be a major caveat in any claims to foresee the emergence of a new fathering that has the effect of blurring parental gender-role boundaries. Having noted this, what do Brooks and Hodkinson find in their study of early years fathering behaviours and what are the claims they make? Sharing Care identifies three categories of fathers from their interviews. Those who take parental leave and, although they do their best and maybe even the lion's share of the work in the early weeks and months, they will return to employment (two fathers). Then there are those who become primary care-givers in the early years, say because the mother earns more and returns to work (eight fathers), and third, ‘equal care sharers’ whose childcare and domestic activity blurs gender boundaries to the extent that gender difference is effectively undone—these fathers’ parenting is interchangeable with the mothers (14 fathers). The latter category of men/fathers, it is argued, is in the van of new horizons in fatherly care and evidence of ‘caring masculinities’ (p. 26). Here this reviewer took issue with the repetition of the convention about how masculinity is toxic, unemotional, un-associated with caring or intimacy and contrasted with these new men's fathering. Ideas that challenge binary gender stereotypes have been around for a while (see, e.g. ‘caring masculinities’, Elliott (2016) or ‘tender masculinity, as in Pinkett & Roberts’ Boy's Don't Cry, 2019, for the latest rejoinders to monolithic notions of toxic masculinity). This said, it is the behaviour of, and challenges facing, the equal carers that make up the core of the book. The authors take us through most of the usual suspects that cause barriers to practising equal care sharing. These include ‘feminised daytime spaces’ where men on their own feel awkward pushing a buggy (p. 16), general assumptions of mothers as the primary parent by mothers, fathers and the state, and, Brooks and Hodkinson argue, fathers’ reluctance ‘to take on substantial care-giving roles because of outside established masculine expectations’ (p. 26). Again, for me, the notion about established masculine expectations being inimical to caring, surface yet again as a tired saw. The authors assert that conversations between men and fathers about children and care-giving do not happen (‘not an appropriate topic’, p. 165). Yet for decades, men have been comfortable talking about child-rearing. The thousands of books, guides and manuals written by men for men that can be found with two clicks are testimony to this. Other challenges that men who aspire to equal care-sharing face such as feeling out of place or judged and difficulties in meeting other fathers (p. 154) also seem dated. Brooks and Hodkinson's recommendations for change also seem very familiar. Father-accessible baby-changing facilities, welfare and health professionals being better at including fathers, and ante-natal advice targeting men, have been the subject of campaigns by the like of The Fatherhood Institute for decades. Sharing Care is strong on its review of state policy potential drawing upon comparisons between the UK and the Nordic countries. There are other telling points. For example, the way that patterns of care that work against greater equality of gender roles are established in the first 12 months of care-giving, and the potential for the state to signal an equal approach to fathers and mothers by means of policies relating to, for example, making flexible leave mandatory rather than available by request. These strengths make Sharing Care a worthy resource.

This article charts the UK history of contact in fostering and adoption as it relates to looked after children and their birth relatives. It builds on a recent publication in this journal by one of the authors based on her research on the use of social media by children in care. Here we look at previous practices relating to the question of whether or not contact ought to be ‘allowed’ in which words such as ‘access’ were used, betokening the child as object. We also come up to date with reference to contemporary efforts to recast contact as ‘family time’ that is significant in the child’s continuation of understanding of self. Other words in the lexicon are problematised, including ‘contact’ itself. Attention is also devoted to the social work profession's conception and management of contact. We argue that a critical history of contact reveals the various ways that formal and informal power operates to both regulate and discipline those involved, most centrally the child and birth family members. Drawing upon emerging research relating to social media and contact, the article concludes with a discussion of how young people’s access to, and use of, social media has altered, how contact is managed and ‘policed’, and how this has shifted the balance of power in contact towards greater egalitarianism.

This paper revisits a topic only briefly raised in earlier research, the idea that the grounds for fatherhood can be laid with little or no 'hands-on' experience of fathering and upon these grounds, an enduring sense of being a father of, and bond with, a child seen once or never, can develop. The paper explores the specific experiences of men whose children were adopted as babies drawing on the little research that exists on this population, work relating to expectant fathers, personal accounts, and other sources such as surveys of birth parents in the USA and Australia. The paper's exploration and discussion of a manifestation of fatherhood that can hold in mind a 'lost' child, disrupts narratives of fathering that regard fathering as 'doing' and notions that once out of sight, a child is out of mind for a father. The paper suggests that, for the men in question, a diversity of feelings, but also behaviours, point to a form of continuing, lived fathering practices-that however, take place without the child in question. The conclusion debates the utility of the phrase "birth father" as applied historically and in contemporary adoption processes.

There has been a number of studies on the outcomes of adoption reunions, most of which have focussed on relatively ‘fresh’ reunions. Very few studies have looked at long-term outcomes. Fewer still have discussed reunions and kinship with controversy over firstly, the longevity of reunions, and secondly, what such reunions might engender regarding the relative kinship statuses of adoptive and birth families. This paper critically discusses the existing literature on reunions and kinship, and then reports on the long-term outcomes of 200 ‘matches’ on the Adoption Contact Register for Scotland between 1996–2006, presenting qualitative detail from the 75 respondents who completed questionnaires and sent in stories. The paper invites us to think about how adoption can form an adoptive family and deform a birth family, and how adoption reunions re-form both and everyone included. However, it will especially focus on what a coming together of two people separated by adoption means for the way that they frame their relationship with each other and those around them.

In the light of increased attention to the role of social work in UK adoption practices, this article takes a ‘turn to language’ and examines the neglected field of the words and phrases commonly used in the adoption process. It subjects these to a critical scrutiny and suggests that the vocabulary employed contains inaccuracies, euphemisms, misnomers and aspirational promises and carries implications that limit options and determine outcomes. The article provides other examples from social work practice with children and families and concludes that a critical approach to a profession’s everyday language use can uncover how power is exercised.

The issue of selection of students to social work programmes is one that remains highly contested. While it is clear that there is no single way of choosing the next generation of social work students, nevertheless, there are a number of strongly held beliefs about what 'best practice' means in this fraught field. These can be difficult to challenge, and even harder to shift, in spite of contrary evidence. This paper presents research conducted in Scotland in 2016 as part of the Scottish Government-sponsored Review of Social Work Education. The research set out to consider what selection processes were being used in Scotland and why; more fundamentally, it sought to explore the views of those involved in social work education alongside evidence about the outcomes of the selection processes (that is, data on student retention and success). The article concludes that while there is little evidence that one method of selection to social work programmes is intrinsically better than another, issues of fairness and transparency in selection, as well as diversity, remain pressing.

Every day GP surgery waiting rooms are used by thousands of people, yet the experience of waiting and the nature of the waiting rooms in these surgeries has been neglected as a subject for critical attention. This article reports on a unique photographic research project conducted with GP waiting rooms as the research subject. Using the key phrases ‘healthcare’ and ‘waiting rooms’, and discounting those studies that addressed issues such as length of waiting times, the following databases were searched: CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature), Embase, Health Management Library, HMIC (Health Management Information Consortium), and PubMed. An iterative process was used to select 24 studies that were concerned with the way patients were affected by their surroundings while they waited to see a GP. Although not comprehensive, this literature search has found a broadly representative sample of the existing writings, the points of which are summarised below. Few people look forward to waiting1 and therefore the acknowledgement of patient anxiety and the value of stress-reducing ‘positive distractions’ is frequent. Positive distractions include views of nature, music, and visual art.2 It is argued that perceptions of the quality of care taken over the appearance of a waiting room can be a proxy for care taken over a patient’s health3,,4 and the literature has addressed seating arrangements,1 smell,5 decoration,6 with a view to conveying a sense of ‘homeyness’ that that according to Goelitz and Kahn7 ‘helps the space feel more like a living room’. Dilani8 sums up this approach by suggesting the adoption of a ‘salutogenic’ approach to health waiting spaces which focuses on ‘the factors that keep us well, rather than those that make us unwell’. The waiting period is, in the …

In his article ‘Child sexual abuse, moral panics and emancipatory practice’ (Pilgrim, 2017), David Pilgrim seeks to use our book, Revisiting moral panics (Cree et al, 2015), to construct a straw man, which needs to be knocked down to preserve his own particular view of child sexual abuse. There are many problems in the way he does so, which we address in this response.

Child welfare and protection agencies play an important role in bringing concerns about children and young people to public attention. The press release is a key tool within this. This article reports on findings from an analysis of press releases from selected UK child welfare and protection agencies in 2012. It demonstrates that the information contained in press releases is neither neutral nor dispassionate. Instead, press releases are found to be political artefacts, whose purpose is to galvanise and shape opinion and garner support for a particular standpoint, campaign or the agency itself. In this respect, they must be understood as ‘claims-making’ activities. Because of this, they should, it will be argued, be subject to the same critical scrutiny that we would expect to bring to the presentation of all ‘evidence’.